In a cavernous dark space lit by many small fires, a young woman, probably not much more than a girl, stands on a pedestal naked except for an elaborate paint job, or maybe it is a total-body mediatronic tattoo. A crown of leafy branches is twined around her head, and she has thick voluminous hair spreading to her knees. She is clutching a bouquet of roses to her breast, the thorns indenting her flesh. Many people, perhaps thousands, surround her, drumming madly, sometimes chanting and singing.

Into the space between the girl and the watchers, a couple of dozen men are introduced. Some come running out of their own accord, some look as if they've been pushed, some wander in as if they've been walking down the street (stark naked) and gone in the wrong door. Some are Asian, some European, some African. Some have to be prodded by frenzied celebrants who charge out of the crowd and shove them here and there. Eventually they form a circle around the girl, and then the drumming builds to a deafening crescendo, speeds up until it devolves into a rhythmless hailstorm, and then suddenly, instantly, stops.

Someone wails something in a high, purposeful, ululating voice. Hackworth can't understand what this person is saying. Then there is a single massive drumbeat. More wailing. Another drumbeat. Again. The third drumbeat establishes a ponderous rhythm. This goes on for a while, the beat slowly speeding up. After a certain point the wailer no longer stops between beats, he begins to weave his rap through the bars in a sort of counterpoint. The ring of men standing around the girl begin to dance in a very simple shuffling motion, one way and then the other way around the girl. Hackworth notes that all of them have erections, sheathed in brightly colored mediatronic condoms-rubbers that actually make their own light so that the bobbing boners look like so many cyalume wands dancing through the air.

The drumbeats and the dancing speed up very slowly. The erections tell Hackworth why this is taking so long: He's watching foreplay here. After half an hour or so, the excitement, phallic and otherwise, is unbearable. The beat is now a notch faster than your basic pulse rate, lots of other beats and counterrhythms woven through it, and the chanting of the individual singer has become a wild semi-organized choral phenomenon. At some point, after seemingly nothing has happened for half an hour, everything happens at once: The drumming and chanting explode to a new, impossible level of intensity. The dancers reach down, grip the flaccid reservoir tips of their radioactive condoms, stretch them out.

Someone runs out with a knife and cuts off the tips of the condoms in a freakish parody of circumcision, exposing the glans of each man's penis. The girl moves for the first time, tossing her bouquet up in the air like a bride making her move toward the limo; the roses fountain, spinning end over end, and come down individually among the dancers, who snatch them out of the air, scrabble for them on the floor, whatever. The girl faints, or something, falling backward, arms out, and is caught by several of the dancers, who hoist her body up over their heads and parade her around the circle for a while, like a crucified body just crowbarred off the tree. She ends up flat on her back on the ground, and one of the dancers is between her legs, and in a very few thrusts he has finished. A couple of others grab his arms and yank him out of there before he's even had a chance to tell her he'll still love her in the morning, and another one is in there, and he doesn't take very long either-all this foreplay has got these guys in hair-trigger mode. The dancers manage to rotate through in a few minutes. Hackworth can't see the girl, who's completely hidden, but she's not struggling, as far as he can tell, and they don't seem to be holding her down. Toward the end, smoke or steam or something begins to spiral up from the middle of the orgy. The last participant grimaces even more than the average person who's having an orgasm, and yanks himself back from the woman, grabbing his dick and hopping up and down and hollering in what looks like pain. That's the signal for all of the dancers to jump back away from the woman, who is now kind of hard to make out, just a fuzzy motionless package wrapped in steam.

Flames erupt from several locations, all over her body, at once, seams of lava splitting open along her veins and the heart itself erupting from her chest like ball lightning. Her body becomes a burning cross spread out on the floor, the bright apex of an inverted cone of turbulent steam and smoke. Hackworth notices that the drumming and chanting have completely stopped. The crowd observes a long moment of silence while the body burns. Then, when the last of the flames have died out, an honor guard of sorts descends from the crowd: four men in black body paint with white skeletons painted on top of that. He notes that the woman was lying on a square sheet of some kind when she burned. Each of the guys grabs a corner of the sheet. Her remains tumble into the center, powdery ash flies, flecks of red-hot coals spark. The skeleton men carry the remains over to a fifty-five-gallon steel drum and dump it in. There is a burst of steam and lots of sizzling noises as the hot coals contact some kind of liquid that was in the drum. One of the skeleton men picks up a long spoon and gives the mix a stir, then dips a cracked and spalled University of Michigan coffee mug into it and takes a long drink.

The other three skeleton men each drink in their turn. By now, the spectators have formed a long queue. One by one they step forward. The leader of the skeleton men holds the mug for them, gives each one a sip. Then they all wander off, individually or in small, conversing groups. Show's over.